Saturday, June 07, 2014

The Amartya Sen Lecture 2014 at the London School of Economics was given by the director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde and included a Brontë quote:

Let me conclude with some wisdom from Charlotte Brontë: “Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star”.
This is really what economic empowerment is all about—freedom, dignity, opportunity.

4. Get romantic and see where the heroine in Charlotte Brontë’s tale flees across the dramatic Yorkshire Moors. Three film versions of this popular classic were filmed at Haddon Hall, said to be the best example of medieval manor house in existence! You’ll find it in Bakewell. Book in for a tour. (Anne Gorringe)

Haworth – The famous Brontë sisters moved to Haworth - a literary mecca - in 1820 and lived in Haworth Parsonage, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Hosts the Brontë Vintage Gathering annually on the second weekend in May. The Keighley and Worth Valley Railway passes through the town. The Edwardian Oakworth station was a location for the famous 1970s film The Railway Children.

The Guardian gives you tips to explore the literary landscape of Ireland:

Driving away from the city I passed through glorious landscapes (those hills like "a basket of eggs") then stopped at Drumballyroney, where the Brontë sisters' father, Patrick, was born in 1777. Two buildings, the church and the old school house (where Patrick preached and taught), contain a fine collection of manuscripts and diaries written in the hand of Charlotte Brontë. In the chapel – an atmospheric room with solid stone walls and ancient wood floors – there's a life-size figure of Patrick, poised at his pulpit, and three ghostly statues of the Brontë girls, sitting in their pews; demanding hush.

Ruth Graham on The Slate thinks that you should be embarrassed if you read YA fiction:

But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable. There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott.

We rather think that you should be embarrassed if you are not able to appreciate good literature. Better to read good YA literature than bad 'adult' one. We are not alone thinking we don't like being patronized (check New Republic for instance).

Yet the moor is still thought of as a non-place, waiting to be colonised by language. Atkins shows that it has always been an environment constructed by and through literature. Brontë, Auden and Conan Doyle are his guides. The featurelessness of the moor is a gift to the novelist, providing unmappable territory in which terrible things can happen. These fictional horrors feed back into the cultural imagination. Murderers bury their dead on the moors. (Jon Day)

In American Smoke, you mention visiting the place where Kerouac's diary is kept. These kinds of artefacts might be extinct very soon, with writers putting their thoughts online.
IS: At the actual place where I saw Kerouac's original in the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin, Texas, there was this huge, very rich depository of all this stuff. Piles of some stuff that you'd think was junk and actual libraries that belonged to Norman Mailer – and here's Kerouac's book. Upstairs, where I was looking at my old notebooks and things that were piled up on a table, they were beginning to sort through hard drives. I had thrown away my original hard drive. I just had it on a skip and it was going. I thought, wait a minute, this holds more material than those notebooks, so I rescued it and they bought that as part of my archive. It was sitting there on the table in Texas, a battered old hard drive, where they can extract all the versions of all of the books I had written on it. The first things were handwritten, typewriter all of that. Since Lights Out Of The Territory they have been written on a computer. The original one was this great big hefty thing. That's gone and it's now over there. But now, I can see those places will be accumulating memory sticks or whatever, I don't know what form it will take, but it'll all be electronic and it'll all be some massively weird place, rather than the idea that you can actually physically pick up old note books and sketch books, a little diary written by Charlotte Brontë, all those things that are quite exciting. (Tim Burrows)

How about a Michael Bay version of "Jane Eyre" where literally everything in England gets blown up?

Mahim Maher writes in The Jewish Journal about her first experiences with Islam in Pakistan:

And then, at my new school, a convent ironically, I was introduced to a certain brand of Islam as interpreted by women who are the equivalent of Mr Brocklehurst at Lowood institution in the pages of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In front of the entire class, my Islamic studies teacher, a morbidly obese, sweating pig of a woman, yanked me by the ear four times before beating me around the face for not being able to recite Qur’anic verses I was supposed to learn by heart.

In a stroke of brilliance, the author makes allusions to great literature. From Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to Proust, from Joseph Conrad to Thomas Hardy's Tess of D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, she uses such literary classics to make her points. (Martha Grimes)

Also on Bookreporter, an interview with Lauren Willig, author of That Summer:

BRC: How much research do you typically undertake for each book? How long did it take to research and write That Summer?
LW: I always like to do a few months of heavy-duty research before I start writing so that the historical material can seep in and infuse the story. During that stage, I do nothing but read everything I can get my hands on written during or about the time period. In the case of That Summer, I had a particularly rich source base. There were monographs about life in Victorian London, social histories, biographies, letter collections (those Pre-Raphaelites certainly knew how to put pen to paper!), poetry and, best of all, novels. Jane Eyre and Agnes Greywere first published in 1847; Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton in 1848. Reading what my heroine would have written provided an excellent touchstone for both the diction and the mores of the time --- and, of course, gave me a good excuse to re-read Jane Eyre.

On this particular day, it feels like we’re taking in the cinematography for a production of Wuthering Heights, except for the world’s tallest totem pole in the background, of course. (Meghan Jessiman)

The frames have the brownish, ominous tint of old blood. The sets conjure the smell of mould and cloying perfume. And the story itself feels like something left behind in Charlotte Brontë’s bottom drawer.

Best served in their breakthrough 2011 track “Easy To Love” with the metal-loving Kaloper’s pounding drums; stirring keys from Shannon’s classical training put on fine display in the pop tradition; the big fret strokes of Lockwood; and the piece de resistance, Mary’s formidable range from a gentle purr to deep tones and high, full-blown Brontë-esque drama.

Durham is not much of an international tourism destination, perhaps because Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens and J. K. Rowling are all from elsewhere (though Durham Cathedral did stand in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter movies). Even those paradigmatic northerners, the Brontës, grew up 90 miles to the southwest of Durham. (Jane Smiley)

The Daily Mail laughs at (but also gives them free publicity) the Jenner sisters and their 'novel':

Who needs the Brontës? Charlotte, Emily and Anne will surely be consigned to the dustbin of history now the Jenners have turned their hands to writing. (Archie Rice)

[Kristina] Horne’s favorite subject is English and she confesses she is a bit of a bookworm. Her favorite reads are the Brontë sisters’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, and the Harry Potter series. (Aaron Moody)

This anagram clue is intended to make you think of Wuthering Heights. It’s interesting and entertaining, but the true meaning of “characters” is really hard to conceal, even when placed in a convincing context as it is here. (Peter Biddlecombe)

Westport author Michaela MacColl celebrated the release of "Always Emily," her fourth young adult novel featuring prominent historical women as a teens, in April. She will be at Westport's Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 7 at 3 p.m. (Sally Allen)

The Telegraph & Argus highlights the performance of the comedian Patrick Monahan at the Haworth Festival (June 25 at the Old School Room).